


The God Abandons Antony

by counterfog



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: First Time, Mild Angst, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Porn With Philosophy, Porn Without Plot, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-08 06:12:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3198410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterfog/pseuds/counterfog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I would ordinarily say ‘allow me to save you from yourself,’ ” she continued, “but one must be prepared to compromise for the sake of a desperate case.”</p><p>“The gods forfend you should compromise, Miss Fisher,” he managed, almost certain, all at once, of what she was going to say and how she was going to say it and what it was bound to do to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (Formerly titled _We Are What We Are, or The God Abandons Antony_ )
> 
> By popular request, meta for this Phracking novella is slowly becoming. You may find this meta [here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3259520)
> 
> Progress: Chapter One annotations complete, Chapter Two annotations complete, Chapter Three annotations complete, Chapter Four annotations complete, Chapter Five complete, Chapter Six Annotations in process.
> 
> Glow long, reader. Glow long.

_I feel a thrill when you arrive_  
_And while you’re near I simply thrive_  
_But if you want to get home alive_  
_Don’t look at me that way._

\--“Don’t Look at Me That Way,” Cole Porter (1928)

_I am dying, Egypt, dying._

\--Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare (1607?)

August, 1929--Melbourne

Jack Robinson answered the summons of his colleague (for that was how he was careful to think of her) with his customary punctuality, bracing for the first sight of her as for a blow to the chest. This too was customary. He was never glad to see her, precisely, but nor was the complicated brew of his feeling for her—compact, for the most part, of admiration, exasperation, and unwilling desire—entirely without joy.

He rapped at the stained glass edging the front door of her house with two knuckles and waited, the air around him cool with August. A whirl of motion and the door opened to reveal Miss Fisher herself, wrapped in one of her terrifying array of kimonos, this one a sort of silvery colour with black embroidery swimming over its surface.

“Jack!” She said his name as she sometimes did, as if he were a delightful surprise to her, even when she expected him.

“Miss Fisher.” He doffed his hat and coat as he came in and they retired to the parlour with the blue-green walls, she pressing a tumbler of Irish whiskey into his hand. While she settled herself on a divan, he leaned against the fireplace to begin drinking, aware (and a touch resigned) that he would probably find himself at a more dangerous proximity to her at some point in the evening, drifting towards her as his resistance waned like a comet drawn into orbit around a star. He knew she liked to feel the quality of her own flame and he had a long history of playing the moth.

It was a game he allowed himself on occasion, relying on some old instinct of self-preservation to draw him back from defeat at the last moment. _How about here? Warm. Here? Warmer. Here? Not there, man. You’re not for burning today._ Sometimes he fancied she could see this little monologue as it raced through his head, as clearly as if it were printed in lights on a picture house marquee. He thought this without bitterness. It was an order of the world as inevitable as the changing seasons or the correctness of wearing brilliantine on the hair in professional settings. Sometimes he told himself he allowed her to see her effect on him to indulge her, because he required her intelligence or her cooperation. He was honest enough, with himself, at least, to acknowledge this as a half-truth. He enjoyed their affinity ( _a waltz_ , he had once called it. _Slow and close_ , she had replied) but its equilibrium was a delicate thing with a nasty sting in the tail, the pin about to exit the grenade. Damage this thing—move too quickly or too far away from the refuge of formality—and it was done. End of the line and a few grace notes of shrapnel to remind you of the detonation. By nature, he was a careful man.

“Well, Miss Fisher, is it business or pleasure tonight?”

“Pleasure, Jack? I must say I’m awfully shocked that you’re familiar with the word.”

“It gladdens me to know that anything can shock you,” he said, almost unsmiling, “I’d thought you above that particular emotion.”

“I assure you I’m positively beneath it. Which would you like it to be?”

“Sorry?”

“Business or pleasure? I prefer both at once,” she added after a judicious pause.

“A preference that decidedly does not shock me. And far be it from me to dictate the evening’s agenda—as a humble servant of the law, I mean.”

“ _What_ a coward,” cried Miss Fisher.

“The better part of valour is discretion.”

“And Shakespeare, I’m beginning to believe, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

“That’s patriotism, as you’re well aware.”

“Your penchant for accuracy is commendable. The world’s our oyster, which we with—what is it?—”

“Sword.”

“—Which we with sword will open. What will you have? Rumors of unrest among miners in Rothbury and bankers in New York? Abbotsford’s chances for the Grand Final? The Victorian state election and the aftermath of the Tasmanian flood? Garbo and the Great Lover? Celanese coats and Basque frocks? _Realpolitik_ and the Kellogg-Briand Pact? Mandatory Palestine and the flight of the _Graf Zeppelin_? A game of checkers? Murder? A waltz?”

“Another drink,” said Jack, noticing, without much surprise, that he was now sitting on the edge of the divan where Miss Fisher reclined—and with no recollection of how he had got there. He tugged at his collar.

“Discreetly and with valour,” she said after a pause.

“A consummation devoutly to be wished,” he replied, as she cast him a glance that was equal parts severity and fire. He did his best to ignore this. “These are the facts, Miss Fisher. In my experience, you rarely do anything without a reason and you rarely summon me unless you need me. Moreover, when you are evasive it’s generally because you’re hiding something of potential value, possibly of value to me. An uneasy circumstance to be sure, though surely we’ve stumbled into greater mysteries. Nonetheless, I confess myself at a loss. You called me. I came. What do you need?”

“For once, Jack,” she said, gently setting down her empty glass, “I think that’s a question you ought to ask yourself.” She took the cup from his hand, careful not to let their fingers brush. Then she raised her eyes to meet his and, deliberately, turned the tumbler and set her lips to the place his mouth had last touched, swallowing the last drops of whiskey before setting the glass next to her own. He watched the subtle contraction of the muscles in her long throat and felt the pulse in his own neck drum harder in response.

Really, it had all been very ordinary. He thought, afterwards (though he could never be sure), that this might have been the moment when it ceased to be so, when he recognized the feverish brightness of her eyes, the extra edge to her wit, the tense speed of her low voice, the emptiness of the house, which, apart from themselves, held none of the impromptu family she had drawn together and clung to so fiercely. He found himself unable to speak.

“Would you like to hear my theory? I think it’s rather a good one. You are, by your own admission, a servant of law. And the law of Jack Robinson’s need is service—it must believe that it obliges the need of another. And it must believe that when there is no other need to oblige it simply doesn’t exist.”

“I’m not quite so parasitical,” he said, attempting a smile, “and not all of us can afford to follow our whims.”

“Perhaps only hemi-parasitical,” she mused, “of the genus—”

“ _Viscum_.”

“Poor man,” she said with humor and understanding and not a little resentment, “you’ll rust inside that armour.”

His fingers gripped the edge of the divan so tightly the knuckles had gone white.

“I would ordinarily say ‘allow me to save you from yourself,’ ” she continued, “but one must be prepared to compromise for the sake of a desperate case.”

“The gods forfend you should compromise, Miss Fisher,” he managed, almost certain, all at once, of what she was going to say and how she was going to say it and what it was bound to do to him.

It was too late, had been too late, really, from the moment he met her.

“Save me, Jack Robinson.”


	2. Chapter 2

Phryne had arrayed herself in one of her most seductive attitudes, back pressed lightly against the divan, legs curved (just so) around the body of the man who shared it, who was still (more’s the pity) sitting rigidly upright in the face of the most persuasive argument she could make without actually touching him. And this she refused to do—yet. Dear, buttoned-up, battened down, intransigent, infuriating man—if he were to enjoy this at all, he needed to act of his own accord. And—she knew it like she knew the shape of her own palm—in order for his restraint to permit this action, he needed to believe that she needed him. It was true in one sense, although not in another. To every lover who had ever asked her (every one, that is, after that most disastrous affair when she had formed her philosophy) she had offered the truth: she belonged and would belong to no one, man, woman, or otherwise.

Nonetheless, in certain moments of stillness or panic or the extreme exhaustion that sometimes hit her at the eleventh hour of a difficult case, she could admit that there was something in the inspector that was necessary to her. It was there in his dour mouth, the quirk of his brow when she scored a point in their badinage (as good as a silent _touché_ ). It was there in his voice, intimate even when he disapproved of her. It was there in his unassuming kindness, the weight he gave her counsel, the wits he matched to her own, and even (yes) in his studied resistance to her charms, though she couldn’t tell whether self-preservation or pride in some unspoken code of behavior formed the greater part of his refusal of their attraction.

So it was, in all honesty, one of the lesser counterfeits of her life when she whispered again: “Save me, Jack Robinson.”

He leaned over her slowly, placing his arm carefully on the back of the divan, his face hovering inches above her own. “Impossible, Miss Fisher,” he breathed, “the devil knows his own.” He brought his lips to hers. “Folly,” A touch on the left corner, the philtrum, the right. “Lunacy.” She felt her lower lip sucked into the interior of his mouth and released with a pleasing smack. He drew back a bit and she took a chance, a neat dab of her tongue on his front teeth, here and then gone, politely begging for entrance like two knuckles rapping at a door. She was unprepared for the effect but approved it utterly—a forceful reapplication of slick, whiskey-tinged pressure. Their tongues slid together and against each other, a complete kiss that burned right down to her belly, unruly and effervescent, as if she were transforming into a Balthazar’s-worth of champagne.

All this and not a single inch of their flesh was touching apart from their mouths. Phryne would have laughed in delight had she not been worried about discouraging the inspector at this solemn and delicate moment.

In the usual way of things, Phryne preferred a more direct approach and it took every ounce of her limited supply of self-control to allow Jack the opening moves. In most cases, her primary requirements in a partner were merely enthusiastic complicity and a certain _je ne sais quoi_. Her own purview was the active work of seduction. It was her care and also her joy. This was perhaps, thought Phryne hopefully, evidence of what the Freudians called a normal narcissism. She was a sybarite by inclination and among the forms of power, pleasure was neither the least, in her opinion, nor the most corrupt. Against a world that denied so much on the basis of intangibles like gender (the exercise of her own body and mind for a start), she fought with every weapon in her arsenal: jewel-coloured wines and soft fabrics, music and art and kind companions…

(At least one of whom—my God!—could kiss like a very incubus when it suited him.)

Some of her armaments had been gifted her, like the chance fortune that she (a hardscrabble Collingwood urchin under the skin) occasionally regarded with a degree of guilt that would have shocked her family. Her politics were inconsistent and unsystematic, though she claimed a thorough knowledge of revolutionary theory when convenient. She believed in the redistribution of wealth and would have been happy to break down the chariot of capitalism for scrap—added to which, she rather admired the brass of one Camellia, a Chinese communist who happened to be married to a particularly memorable lover. Although she had never given much sustained attention to the dialectic or commodity fetishism (mostly on the grounds that such attentions were bound to interfere with her enjoyment of imported perfume), she was enough of a Marxist to encourage the red-ragger rhetoric of Burt and Cec, invaluable employees in a number of capacities, and enough of a pragmatist to employ them in the first place.

(Jack had shrugged out of his jacket and was now applying his teeth to the juncture of her neck and shoulder in a way that made her distinctly lightheaded.)

Yes, she had been given much, but other methods of survival she had had to cultivate. And first among the insurrectionist’s skills she had got by her own will were the arts of desire. For every dart of _slut_ and _whore_ and _bitch_ that had been thrown at her, the little death of orgasm—in company or alone—negated these words with others— _woman, human, living, moving, here_. Nor could she deny that the pursuit of pleasure, her own and others’, had become for her nearly an ethic, something she hurtled after with every faculty, spurred on by the ghosts of those lives she had seen extinguished in war and peace. If men and women died in her arms now, let it be _la petite mort_ and let it be for joy.

Jack had paused to look at her—and possibly for breath—his arm still braced against the divan, his eyes boring down into hers with a thrilling intensity.

“Are you bored, Miss Fisher?” he said, not kindly at all (and this too was thrilling).

“Not in the least, Jack,” she said, panting slightly.

“Then do me the courtesy of attending when I’m—addressing you.”

“Dear me,” she said, striving for lightness, “what a daunting verb. I think, perhaps, you’ll have to give me some kind of incentive.”

The expression on his face was a strange olio of lust and incredulity. “The nerve of you,” he ground out, “the living nerve.” But his hands were deft and quick as he flicked open the frogs that held her _robe de chambre_ closed. He concentrated his gaze on her breasts, fashionably small, with great fondness. But this, it turned out, was merely a feint. His other hand had coasted between her legs and one long finger was now gliding inside her. Incentive indeed. “Sensible choice,” she said, rolling her hips in response. Another finger joined the first—and then a third. Not to touch him in response was torture. Later, she was going to tell him exactly how much discipline she had been exercising and he (if he took the part of wisdom) was going to look very, very impressed.

“One would never want to be less than sensible, Miss Fisher,” he said with a salt of irony.

“Under the circumstances, I believe you could call me Phryne.”

He had had permission to call her by her given name nearly all the time they had known one another. And yet it was only in moments of extremity that he forgot himself enough to use it.

“I’m not sure we’ve achieved the appropriate degree of intimacy.”

“Not,” said Phryne, “for lack of trying.”

“Forgive me, I thought that it was I, for reasons still obscure to me, who was meant be orchestrating this pretty abruption.” (He certainly was a quick study.)

“What, out of curiosity, would be the appropriate degree of intimacy?”

“In this case?” He punctuated the question by curling his fingers inside her. “A more personal acquaintance with the facts.”

“How urbane. More personal than, say, the colour of a woman’s nipples?” she said, toying with one of her own.

“Oh, certainly more personal than that, though the knowledge is…pleasant. But I should hate to overstep on the basis of such trivial information. No, Miss Fisher, I couldn’t possibly call a woman by her first name when I’ve barely known for five minutes how she’ll respond when I put my hand on her—” he stopped.

Colour flooded the crests of his cheeks. Fascinating. She did like a man who blushed.

“You know, I’d been wondering about your favoured term for the female anatomy. No—don’t tell me—I want to guess. Nonsuch? Nick-nack? Never-out? Snatch? Roasting jack would be apposite, but not your style, I think. Quim’s too prim, vulva’s too clinical, and sex is, I suspect, too unspecific to be properly erotic. _La chatte_ , like the French? Jellyroll, perhaps? Beaver? Satchel of Venus? Hal’penny? Twitchet? Geography? Muff?” He had collapsed atop her, laughing helplessly against into her throat as she flung jazz-baby slang into the half-lit parlour. “I myself am partial to jewelry, as far as euphemisms go. But perhaps you prefer—”

“Cunt,” he said definitively.

“Most wonderful,” she replied. “But you were about to enlighten me as to the tender conditions under which you would find it possible to say my name.”

He mumbled something unintelligible to her clavicle.

“Repeat that?”

Jack raised his eyes to hers. He said clearly: “I want to put my mouth on your cunt.”

“Oh, is that all?” His admission rang a bell somewhere in the hot, bright region of her solar plexus.

“For now? Near enough. Only a cad would make free with a woman’s name before he’s given her a proper thrill.”

Phryne loosened his tie and tossed it gaily to the floor by way of response. “Have at it, Jack,” she said.

He looked as grim (she imagined) as Antony after the Battle of Actium. Always, there was the smallest edge of sadness in his affect and she saw it in him even now—something held perpetually in abeyance. She wondered at its cause, which she had never quite traced to the source. She meant to see it banished but knew, too, that it was likely his work—and not hers—to do it. She had called him here for her own pleasure, it was true, but his pleasure was not the least part of that—and she did not mean for him to leave her bed more impoverished of life than he had come to it. She had thought of this as she prepared for his arrival, choosing her attire, smoothing her black cap of hair, fitting herself, languorously, with one of Dr. Stopes’s cunning devices. She had thought of how she might reduce, a little, the burden of his formidable reserve. It would be her gift to him—in return for the earthier gift she was determined to receive in her own right. Her pleasure was selfish but it was also generous.

 _Fall not a tear,_ she thought, as his heated breath misted the slit at the top of her thighs. In this, he was more enthusiasm than finesse, which suggested he had had limited opportunities for practice. But even that recommended him to her. A more elegant style of lover would, for example, have been less fervent about the use of the nose as an instrument of stimulation. A crude tactic—but astonishingly effective. She couldn’t seem to stop moaning, now. And it was true that there was nothing to fault either in his plastic knowledge (well) or his employment of tongue and teeth—the one lapping slickly at her cunt ( _cunt!_ he had said) or driving into her rhythmically, the other scraping softly at what the bright young things liked to call the boy in the boat. The orgasm, when it came, was no subtle thing—it was a stunt in a Buster Keaton picture—the house falling down around her ears and then the comic aftermath, in which she found herself whole, alive, and improbably undamaged.

“Well, Jack, and what will you call me now?” she said when she was able.

His eyes scanned her body, returning to her face for a long moment. He was breathing hard. “Words fail, Miss Fisher.”

So. “Thank you for your diligence,” she said, no less eager to have him, but knowing that he had reached some limit within himself and was struggling to break through it. _Jack, Jack, Jack. Is it so difficult, then?_ She ran her hand along the side of his face, tracing the familiar line of his cheekbone, his jaw, cupping his chin, withdrawing.

“Give me a kiss; even this repays me.”

Only much later, after a passage of many more kisses than she bothered to count, did she recognize that he was quoting again.


	3. Chapter 3

She had played him and he knew it. He was having trouble deciding how much he should let that matter. (When, truly told, had she ever done anything but play him?) Her hand pushed against his chest, permitting a few inches of air to divide them. He resisted, exerting just enough pressure to bring their bodies together again, his tongue laving the pulse at her wrist for no other reason than to taste its erratic fluttering. Jack perceived, incongruously, that he was still wearing waistcoat, shirt, and trousers, while she was naked as Eve. They were heavy wool-tweed, his clothes, and must scratch her, though she voiced no complaint. Perhaps she liked it. She had liked it when he had said _cunt_. She had _liked_ it. He regarded this fact with wonder. Never before had it occurred to him, that he, Jack Robinson, might say _cunt_ in the presence of any woman, let alone that she might welcome this boldness rather than reviling it.

“Stand up,” he said to her, rising.

“Faster,” she said murmurously, “then you can say—”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you. Stand up.”

“Afraid I’m still weak in the knees.”

“Liar.”

“Perhaps.” She came to her feet in one lithe movement. “But don’t you like the thought of it anyway?”

“You can’t imagine.”

She stood very straight and very still as he circled her. (He avoided, charily, the knowledge of how closely the current state of affairs—he clad, she utterly revealed—paralleled a certain fantasy on which he had been elaborating for the better part of a year.) Her eyelids rested at half-mast, as if the experience of a man openly contemplating her bare person from all available angles were as tedious as afternoon tea with Aunt Prudence. Only the glitter of her irises (produced, perhaps, by a minute tightening of the muscles at their corners), gave the game away. Her namesake, a _hetaira_ , had stood bare-breasted (so legend had it) before the judges of the Areopagus, who, merely mortal, had pardoned all. Well-named, this Phryne, to whom, in the moment, he too would have forgiven everything. His knowledge of the Classics was spotty—he had had to look up the right passage of Athenaeus in the circulating library on the pretext of tying up a case to do with the trafficking of obscene books, a case that had, in actuality, lost funding several months before. The revelation that Phryne, literally translated, meant “toad” had made him laugh aloud in the reading room, a loss of control he still regarded with unmitigated horror.

Often, now, he dreamed of her. He had used to dream of war—what he had done in war and, painfully, what he had not. He had used to dream of it every night. It was at war that he had begun to read Shakespeare, at first to fill in the long silences between letters from home, then obsessively, the way other men read Bibles and dog-eared back issues of _Photo Bits_. More than ten years on, now, and still the chance fumes of an oil lamp just kindled would sometimes reach him, dragging him back inexorably to the furtive glow of storm lanterns in the trenches at Broodseinde and Ypres, the stink of men living and men dying, mud and cordite. (She knew those smells, it occurred to him, and he was sorry for it, though he could not bring himself to be sorry for what experience had made her. Perhaps that explained her devotion to Shalimar.) He remembered the rare moments of rest and the small circle of lantern-light wavering on a page of the shabby, two-volume set of the Bard’s _Complete Works_ , just about pocket-sized, picked up from a crate of unwanted effects at a nursing station. The pages were flimsy and the ink tended to rub off on his fingers if he held one too long, added to which was the headache of the miniscule text, column-printed to save space, so that reading became an act of decryption.

He had pored, nonetheless, over every line of the damnable object, searching neither for high-flown sentiments nor ribald jokes but for the heavy rhythm of the blank verse, which, when he was lucky, could nearly drown out the rhythm of mortar and gun, a finer anaesthetic than a whole flask of ether. The physical books were long lost now, left to moulder in some French midden after a too-hasty decampment. Only their invisible substance remained with him, more durable, at the last, than their inferior matter:

_If we shadows have offended…_

_If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemn’d…_

_To move wild laughter in the throat of death..._

_Peace!_ _Thou talk’st of nothing…_

 _The bright day is done,_ _and we are for the dark…_

All this, so long a private litany, repeated in the night, every night. Now, the battlefield visitations came to him, at most, once in a week. His other nights were animated by a different kind of torture, infinitely preferable but no less acute. His dreams alternated between—say it—between saving her and fucking her. The former, he understood as an idiot, schoolboy fancy—her competence, part and parcel of her modernity—intoxicated him as much as her thrice-damned French perfume. If she needed him, it was purely as an auxiliary instrument, the optional reaction to her necessary action. And yet, he admitted, this position did not always chafe; he did not feel diminished by it. Her way of exercising power was immoderate but it required, usually, that those she drew into her orbit have free reign to implement their own abilities. To be sure, she was not infallible on this point.

His perversity must have grown very great: he was as aroused by the thought of her leading him by the nose through the alleys of Melbourne (the general condition of his days) as he was by the thought of rescuing her from imaginary dangers in a puerile show of masculine pomp (the general condition of his nights). He knew little of formal psychology but it took no great skill, given the theory of dreams as wish-fulfillment, to riddle out the transparent desire for control that stalked his sleep. It was a relic of upbringing and also of war, which had made him modern, but not modern enough to break the dominant code of hidebound, Antipodean manhood that chained him to the century in which he had been born: its imperial atrocities, its misplaced chivalries, its penny dreadful types. Good blokes. Bad blokes. Rogues and ideal gentlemen. Angels of the house and fallen women. The nineteenth century receded with every breath and with every breath the chain lengthened. And so he crawled his way through the twentieth with the dogged sluggishness of a glacier, waiting for time to integrate him, at last, into its terrible novelty, pausing frequently to nurse his bloody knees. _She_ cared not a fig for crawling or scruples or chains. How could she, who laughed at abnegation and was never without a lock-pick?

He felt the unhappy containment of a new moth rattling the sides of its chrysalis. _You’ll rust in that armour_ , she had said, accurate as the point of a bayonet, wounding, as was her merciless way, without leaving a mark. _I am what I am_. She had said that too. He could say it of himself as well (who could not?). Tin soldier, standing sentinel in the cold. Things changed so quickly around him. He often experienced the alterations they wrought within him as violations (the speed of an engine, the demolition of a building, the necessity of a strike, the dissolution of a marriage, the first time he had seen a death, the first time he had caused one, the first time he had realized how easy it was to kill, the first time he had realized how easy it was to die.). He had treated Miss Fisher, for better and worse, as if she were fire encountered in ignorance—melting agent, extremest alternative, craved and feared, permissible only under glass and at a distance, where she could illuminate but not scorch. She was changeable--and unchanging only in this--but he would never change her from it, nor wish to. He was resigned to that. But there was no fairness in it, when at every moment he felt her influence thawing him into an unfamiliar shape. And he did not know how far he could burn or bend before he broke, before some profound adjustment negated everything he was. It was not comfortable knowledge for a grown man to possess about himself.

In his dreams, depressingly literal, he was proactive, voluble, and sure-footed—never at a loss for a word or a strategy or a swift upper-cut to a threatening jaw. Indeed, he was quite sure that the real Miss Fisher would have failed to recognize the version of him that appeared in these lurid, involuntary, and highly embarrassing scenarios. No more would she have recognized her own dream-avatar, who had once (dressed in a mere wisp of pink lingerie), foregone, in turn, a new Parisian wardrobe, a sapphire parure, an intimate dinner with Sessue Hayakawa, the offer of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, and the directorate of the Victorian constabulary in order to cop a root with him against a patch of wall on the exterior of the Esplanade Hotel: hot jazz blooming through St. Kilda from the Eastern Tent and shadows moving fitfully over their bodies so that anyone who happened to glance at the right moment would see him pinning his respected colleague to the wall, his cock buried in her cunt, one of his hands between her teeth where she had dragged it up to stifle her cries. In waking life, he still couldn’t pass without blushing the spot where his traitorous unconscious, frightfully precise in this instance, had staged the scene.  

So let her play him. Let each of them kill the other, just an ounce, just for now. The terms of it were still to be negotiated and he did not see how they could possibly resolve into anything except disaster. But what price, really? The fine mechanism of their partnership? Now that was a true danger. As to the rest, the integrity of his self-knowledge? Already breached. The sanctities of monogamy and matrimony? Divorced now, he scarcely knew what it was he held sacred anymore.

He believed his own sense of sexual fidelity too fixed to alter. His interest tied itself to an object and, given a drop of encouragement, was entire and unflagging. It had always been so. And yet he did not blame Miss Fisher for the frankness and liberality of her appetites. Ill-matched as they were in this way, he had observed too much joy and consideration in her liaisons to condemn them. As far as he was concerned, the only real sexual immorality was the violation of consent. And yet it was lonely to watch her take other lovers, _would be_ lonely, again and again. For the first time, he reasoned that the exercise of stoicism tonight (not, he reflected grimly, that he had shown much so far) would do nothing to relieve that sense of loss. The thought was so startling he couldn’t compass it.

He combatted the shock by reaching around to palm her breasts (he was standing behind her now), gratified by the shiver that raced through her. Her own arms came up to twist his head to hers for a kiss. He evaded the gesture, presented her, instead, with two fingers, which she sucked into her mouth immediately. He withdrew them, lingering over the textures of palate and inner lip, then brought the fingers to her nipples, circling once left, once right, once left, once right—and then, giving in to some inner devil—delivering a hard pinch. Her gasp registered on his ears, loud as a shot. He turned her immediately and saw—he didn’t know why he was surprised—a slight, fey smile forming on her lips.

“Your reward,” he said, dropping to his knees and bracing his hands around her ribcage, “for making me do all the work.” He drew the ill-treated nipple into his mouth, where it beaded so swiftly that it seemed to him as if even this mute part of her were working to suppress a peal of laughter.

“Your idea of work stands in alarming need of correction.”

“Oh no—you’re thinking of my idea of a good time. My idea of work is, by contrast, perfectly adequate.”

“Well, at least you’ve mastered ‘reward.’”

“I don’t suppose you’re concealing a bed on the premises…”

“Have you got a warrant?”

“Miss Fisher,” he said, standing slowly, “what would you do if you had to choose between, say, a frock of fatal beauty and the prospect of a man’s head between your thighs?”

“By which you mean we’ve both been asking a lot of silly questions. But what if I adore silly questions? And what if you enjoy them a good deal more than you know?”

“How,” he said patiently, “might one reach the sanctity of the boudoir?”

“Oh, alright. Upstairs and ’round the landing—but there’s a catch—”

“Isn’t there always?”

“The bedroom is a finicky creature and semi-divine. You must approach it with reverence, an offering in your arms.”

“Of what nature?”

She struck the pose of a bathing beauty on a postcard, _contrapposto_ , hands curved coyly at hip and neck. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

(How did she hit, so unswervingly, on the design most likely to undo him—how did she always know?)

Dizzy with desire, he hauled her to him and lifted her with a philosophic grunt, heading for the stairs when he was sure she was secure.

“Don’t give me that martyred look,” she said.

“I was born with this martyred look,” he said with dignity, “it is the secret to my success.”

“Funny, I’d always thought it was the hocus-pocus of your focus. Are there any other secrets you wish to share with me at the present time?”

“Not a one, begging your pardon. Wouldn't want to decimate my masculine mystique.”

“I shouldn’t worry overmuch about that. Is it curiosity that’s the hobgoblin of little minds?”

“Consistency, Miss Fisher.”

“Oh good,” she said obscurely.

Unless he was mistaken, her trailing hand was flirting with his erection. Unless he was _very much_ mistaken, she was humming Cole Porter as she did it.


	4. Chapter 4

When Jack walked into the dark bedroom with Miss Fisher in his arms, he was breathing only a bit more rapidly than usual. Still naked, she slid down his body to busy herself with lighting an electric lamp under a shade of coloured glass. He had always observed that people moved differently when unclothed, either more confidently or less. To his recollection, she was the only one he had ever seen who adopted exactly the same postures, mannerisms, and gestures, covered or uncovered. A press of a button and yellow light ate a circular plinth from the massed shadows. The place now revealed to his sight felt less like a room than a ventricle of her heart.

He assessed the scene with a detective’s comprehensiveness, senses stretched to full capacity. Walls scalloped in gilt and some hue he would have called purple, though he suspected Miss Fisher would not have considered the adjective particularly apt. Sinuous nude, Fauvist or Cubist—modern, at any rate—suspended over a pink marble fireplace crowded with vases, empty and full. Vienna Secession painting just across the way, interlocked figures blazing with gold leaf or a very good imitation. Screens arabesqued in black and a light carpet. A solid Victorian dresser and a vanity loaded with bottles and brushes and other feminine bric-a-brac. Heavy curtains and in one corner a bathing tub, decadent, pale, and smooth. Scent of Shalimar heavier here than in the rest of the house but not cloying. Of the bed, he approved, while finding it faintly ridiculous—a monstrous thing covered in contrasting velvets, light and dark. Heaped over it was the pelt of an animal that had possessed thick skeins of shining grey fur when it had lived.

Merely to occupy this room was to feel surrounded by her, as if each surface, each shift in the air, were a deliberate proxy for her touch. His heart throbbed in his ears and he felt, suddenly, how much a mockery had been the evening’s pretense of control. She was no more tame to the hand than a tiger who had inexplicably decided to play a house cat for a night. How strange it was that, in light of this knowledge, he should only want her more.

_The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne…_

This room was the epicentre of her sphere. It had been made to frame her and, though it welcomed, it also reminded you that it had been designed to suit a singular taste to which you too were now invited to cater. A slight awkwardness thickened his tongue as she pressed him into an overstuffed chair.

“Sit.”

“For what purpose?” he said.

“Such suspicion! I thought, perhaps, you might like to remove your shoes.”

A short bark of a laugh escaped his throat as he looked down at the staid pair of oxfords (shined every day with military thoroughness), impassive witnesses to the debaucheries he had so far committed this night. “Surely I have yielded the right to call myself a gentleman.”

“It is true, alas, that gentlemen do not wear shoes into a lady’s boudoir. Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to forfeit the title until further notice.”

“Is there no way to redeem it?”

“ _I_ will call you a gentleman, if _you_ will call me Phryne.”

He raised an eyebrow, attempting to look blasé, perhaps, but said nothing.

She gave a funny little Gallic shrug, one-shouldered, and began to unlace his offending footwear. “If the illness is a surfeit of clothing, then the cure must be a total lack of it.”

“Your proposition contains an essential fallacy—”

“—which you, ungentle Jack, are just going to have to ignore.” By now, she had eased the shoes from his feet, unclipped and removed his sock garters, and rolled down and discarded the socks themselves with an abandon he would never have countenanced had he been undressing in his own quiet flat. Her hands rested lightly on his bare ankles, invisible, from his perspective, underneath the cuffs of his trousers.

“Would you like me to make you come?” she said casually, looking up into his eyes.

And so all his much-vaunted resistance (much-vaunted, at least, within the privacy of his mind) had come to this. His throat constricted as he stared back at her. Not a word could slip through and he felt his face gathering into a scowling rictus. He willed her to understand the message that would not sound.

Up and down the muscles of his calf her hands slid, rippling the fabric of his trousers. “How fierce you look. Shall I make it easier for you, my gracious silence? From now until one of us says the word possum, ‘yes’ is ‘no’ and ‘no’ is ‘yes.’ Do you comprehend the game?”

“No,” he said, with a brief nod.

“And do you approve it?”

“No." He nodded again.

“What country, friend, is this? Illyria?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“I see, then perhaps it is Elysium. I would like very much to make you come.”

“No,” he got out, able to deploy only the lowest register of his voice, which announced its origin—how not, now that she had named it—in an element of rust. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” he added (a little deliriously, only half knowing why).

“Ah, so you _have_ read something written after 1616. Take off that waistcoat, Jack,” she said as she rose.

“No.” He followed her to his feet, stripping the waistcoat from his shoulders with an attitude that some small, detached portion of his mind appreciated as a sort of sullen defiance. As if from a distance, he watched himself hurl the blameless garment to the floor. She sank into the chair he had just vacated, crossing her long legs primly while he remained standing. He faced her as if testifying before a tribunal.

“Now the braces.” Not even a whisper of amusement moved across her face. Her voice was as measured as a square of Seyès-ruled paper.

“No,” he said quietly, striving to match her aplomb. He undid the buttons that secured trousers to braces, casting those too aside. Each paradoxical refusal—the word at odds with the action—amplified the peculiar impression of weightlessness that was building in his chest. Enough of this and he might lift into the air like a zeppelin. 

“Trousers,” she said, inspecting her fingernails. (He thought he might want to make her pay for that.) Silently, he unbuttoned the fly and let them sink away from him.

“The rest of it.”

As suavely as it could be done, which was not very, he complied. (He’d have challenged Valentino himself, had the man not been dead for three years, to remove a frox and trunk drawers with any degree of grace.) Save for a wristwatch, courtesy of the Anzac forces, he stood before her altogether revealed.

Her eyes surveyed his body with an almost physical pressure and he recalled the great searchlights on battleships, which, at their brightest, seemed to carve weirdly regular rounds out of cloud-curdled skies and the black tremor of oceans at night, capricious materials that should have had no truck with the uncompromising geometries of the electric age. It was quietly extraordinary to him that eyes such as hers should leave no scar on his skin to remember her by. At Queenscliff she had seen him in bathers, of course. His costume revealed the correct amount of skin for sunning and swimming—the correct amount and no more. And yet he had caught her watching him at odd instants from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. It had amused him—both the thought that his body might compel approbation—swimming lay well within the ambit of his physical confidence—and the thought that it might compel approbation from _her_. Never for a moment on those beaches had he felt unduly exposed, merely buoyant with salt-air and self-possession. Was that what she felt, every moment of the day? It was heady and, in a way, a pleasure as cerebral as a game of chess.

This display was in no way comparable. While the state of undress was familiar to him—a phase passed through every dusk and dawn, always, of late, in the process of correction— _nakedness_ was a condition almost wholly foreign. Slowly, as she sat across from him, there flowered across her face a smile of such innocent hedonism that his breath caught somewhere behind his sternum. (Where had he seen that smile before?—ah, yes—a film poster plastered on a kiosk outside the station. The name of the picture, to the best of his recollection, was _Naughty But Nice._ ) He was going to expire on the spot if she did not let him have her soon.

She pursed her lips and emitted a low whistle. “I should have to know what you look like in Roman armour to be sure, but the available evidence suggests that Ramón Novarro hasn’t got a thing on you.”

“I believe I’ve made known to you my feelings about Roman armour.”

“Well don’t trouble yourself on my account. Your current apparel is simply divine. A good watch does such remarkable things for the proportions of a masculine forearm. May I touch you?”

“No, Miss Fisher.” He paused. “That, by the by, was a very emphatic _no_.”

Coming to her feet, she set her hands to his chest. They ran down and around, dividing (just as she reached the place where he most needed them) to dart around his back. She cupped his arse, briefly, then drew a finger along his spine, from the base of his back all the way to the nape of his neck. He felt as if she had secured an invisible cord there that might be plucked to elicit different notes of sensation, like a string in the belly of a depraved piano. The urge to quotation rushed in upon him precipitously, brought on by the additional surge of blood to his cock. _Quaint mazes in the wanton green…Strange fits of passion have I known…_ and (humorously)  _Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully? Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew?..._ He suppressed the compulsion ruthlessly, imploring the air for carnal continence under his breath.

“God make you good,” she said wickedly, “but please, oh please not yet.”

“Not while you’re around,” he replied, a whiff of acid in the articulation of his consonants.

At that she laughed and he felt the puff of air against his neck, somewhere in the vicinity—because now he was well and truly done for—of the carotid artery. Now her hands gripped his upper arms as she bit delicately at his ear. She capped the gesture with a forceful meeting of mouths. There was no nicety in the rough salinity of their kiss, thirst’s cure and its cause in one— _infinite variety, indeed._ Suddenly, she deprived him of her mouth. His eyes, which had drifted shut, snapped open, and he sensed his face arranging itself in an accusing stare. Grasping his hips, she knelt before him (with such insouciance, she did it!), her eyes now level with his cock. He looked down at the picture she made and inhaled sharply.  

As he watched, she rested her cheek against his erection, passing the different textures of her face over it—chin, nose, lips, eyebrows, even the thick fringe at her forehead and the whorls of her ear—nuzzling—like an animal—suggesting without fulfilling.

“Your mouth,” he said with difficulty, “use your mouth.”

“To do what?”

In a voice of such baleful calm that he barely recognized it as his own, he said the words: “Put your mouth on my cock.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes—I mean no—decidedly no—for God’s sake, Phryne—”

“For God’s sake? Doubtful. But for the sake of hearing you say my name—” She licked a line of electricity from the apex of his balls to the tip of his penis. A sustained _mmmm_ -ing, low in her throat, let him know how much she liked the taste of him. He felt that sound sparking between his shoulder-blades and at the backs of his knees, even in the hollows of the tendons of his heels.

Her tongue circled his glans, dwelled for a fraught moment at his frenulum while her hands, anchored hard behind him, made exploratory incursions on the channel between his buttocks. She played with great subtlety, nipping and blowing, applying every variegation of suction from touches so light he could hardly feel them to a pressure robust to the point of pain, each caress as distinctive as a human face. The experience was as close, probably, as he would ever get to what men, talking among themselves, referred to reverently as the Platonic blow. And all the while he could feel her watching him, learning what he liked and what he liked better and best.

“This way?” she stopped long enough to ask.

“No and no and no, a thousand times.” The pressure swelled to such a pitch he could hardly master it. “Stop,” he gasped.

“Why would I do that?”

He saw that she would have been happy to stay with him until he came (would she swallow or spit daintily into the painted cup that stood on the small table in the corner?). All his body clamoured for it—to stay in the hot hollow of her mouth to the bittersweet end, to release two years (more or less) of acute tension—and still his mind rebelled.

He tore away from her in a clumsy rush, a lock of his hair (long melted of its protective layer of pomade) flopping in his eyes. Blindly, he backed up until he hit a wall, his breath labored in his ears, his palms pressing against the coolness of the paper.

“Possum,” she said, standing and holding her hand out to him as she might to a wild creature she had startled. “Possum.” She approached until they were pressed together, front to front, and he dropped his head into the bend of her shoulder, panting as if he had just run a very great distance.

“Possum, then,” he answered roughly, struggling for something to restore levity to the scene, “unless you want a proper reason to say ‘faster than Jack Robinson.’ ”

“That’s not fair,” she said in relief, “when you know I’m dying to have a proper reason to say faster than—”

“I must insist,” he said, lifting his head.

“Was he any relation? The original Constable Robinson?”

“No relation,” he temporized, “and I haven’t been a constable for years. Do you know what you’re asking of me?”

“A sliver of bliss. Merely that.”

 _My soul in a mangle._ “More than a sliver, I think” he said ruefully. “The price—”

“No price.”

“The price, forgive me, seems—very high.”

“Why?” The quiet lengthened like a shadow. “My dear, impossible gentleman, this I have a right to know.”

“I’m not like you,” he said at last, “I don’t—change.”

“I think I’m enough me for the both of us,” she said carefully.

“Excessive,” he said, hooking a piece of her hair behind her ear, “prodigal, incomparable.” He considered for a moment. “Your bed is absurd, you know.”

“I take offense at that.”

“—absurd but rather evocative. It strikes me as the kind of bed in which one might learn to be a more modern man.”

“It has been known,” Phryne said solemnly, “to work miracles for many a sufferer of intractable anhedonia.”


	5. Chapter 5

It was not often that Phryne found it difficult to divest a man of his clothing. But Jack Robinson, she had discovered, was one of those persons for whom the state of dishabille entailed husking a great many other things besides a layer or two of sartorial ornament. In all fairness, she thought, as he drew her to the bed in its frosting of winter velvet, she could not have failed to guess that he might be.

The challenge of encouraging him to defuse his self-command in the service of his own satisfaction she found agreeable, even ambrosial in its relative rarity. Nonetheless, the depth of his propensity for abstention troubled her. Who else, drawn to the very quick of a sexual decision so obviously desired, would have rejected it so absolutely on the verge of its completion?

Of course, she acknowledged that the human palate was a various thing. Though most people she had encountered were fond of orgasms, if they could come by them, the predilection was not universal. For instance, her friend Mac (a doctor and a skeptic) preferred to give rather than to receive and had once described the sensation of _jouissance_ , as it manifested in her own body, as “a sort of genital sneeze.” To Phryne, Mac had always been generous. After the war, when Phryne had traded her nurse’s uniform for the display of the artist’s model, Mac (still deciding how to go on in the world as a combat-trained lady physician) had come to Paris to visit for three precious months in which each had helped the other to invent herself, bedded down in a pocket-sized room in La Ruche while the bustle of a city accelerating into a new decade floated up from the streets of Montparnasse. Coffee in a single tiny cup (only a little cracked) that you had to pass back and forth between you as you drank. Day-old croissants with butter (real butter!) and honey, a slender wafer of chocolate in wax paper—this feast to be eaten in bed—your cheap blue negligée slithering off your shoulders, her arm around your waist, your heads bent together over a page of Havelock Ellis or Edward Carpenter, crumbs of your banquet collecting in the seam of the binding. You might get angry, one day, at a volume of Lombroso and decide to chuck it through the window to an answering cry of  _bohèmes crasseux!_ You might walk arm in arm with one another down the rue Delambre, round the _coin_ to stare hungrily at the cafés where you couldn’t afford to eat and at the cut violets on which you always wasted a few centimes, no matter how many times you told yourself they’d wilt by this time tomorrow. _Look there!_ , you could say to your friend, _it’s Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, and someday I will wear my hair as short as hers and dance ’til dawn in the middle of the Carrefour Vavin_. And always she would respond: _Someday? Why not now?_

No, however difficult Jack found it to perfect his desires, Phryne guessed that it was not a question of distaste for physical release. It was the yielding in it, perhaps (and a little bit the yielding to _her_ ), the moral trial of obligation weighed against gratification. But neither was this entirely fair. (She was not, after all, so foolish as to believe he denied himself a pleasurable completion when in the privacy of his flat.) It had never been a question of whether the scale of Maat bent towards the heart or the feather. He had told her as much, and as best he could: _I don’t change_. Oh, but he did! And there it was, she thought. He changed. With her, he changed. And he knew it, what’s more. He knew it. She could not have been more astonished had the roof peeled back from the house like the lid of a tin of sardines.

She came instantly, a small, sweet convulsion this time, like the star igniting on a Roman candle viewed from very far away.

“How beautifully you do that,” he said, then cleared his throat as if he felt a bit sheepish about the sentiment. “On a scale from fashionable ennui to intractable anhedonia, how desperate is my case?” He tugged her hair a mite roughly so as to print a line of kisses along the side of her throat with greater efficiency. (She was fond, in moderation, of some tension on the scalp; how clever of him to have guessed.)

“In my expert opinion,” she heard herself say, “you’ve progressed from combustible repression to moderate austerity in the course of an hour or two.”

“Combustible?” he said with menace, as they stretched out on the plush surface of the coverlet. His response to this charge was eloquent: a sinuous twist of his spine caught her off-guard and she found the whole of _her_ pinioned beneath the whole of _him_. Phryne nearly whimpered as their bodies aligned, the good, solid warmth of his weight—she could no longer remember a time when she had not wanted to feel it—soaking into her like dye into a length of linen. Perhaps this was the paradox of all lovers: they lingered on as an invisible colour long after you had washed their embraces from your skin, the mordant of touch fixing their influence indelibly. (If so, her own body must be mottled with every shade in the rainbow of the unseen.) With Jack, it was as if she could feel this fanciful saturation as it occurred, an artless thing, like his grin against her throat (the merest crescent of insubstantial pressure), a transaction of air.

“For such an ill man, you’ve made remarkable improvements,” she said as serenely as she could, given the mad foxtrot of her heart. “The prognosis is really very good.” And then, with more haste than she liked, added: “but there’s still a good distance to travel if you wish to effect a complete recovery.”

“And do I wish to effect a complete recovery?”

“If you didn’t, I should have been certain to tell you so. What is it, exactly, that you are doing to my navel?”

“Soliciting its opinion.”

“Its _expert_ opinion, if you please.”

“Your pardon, I had no idea your navel was a medical professional.”

“It specializes in shallow depression. If you stop, I’m going to weep for a year.”

“Then it’s lucky that help is so close at hand—at belly, rather.” Nipping the underside of one breast on his way, he laced their fingers together over her head. He dipped his mouth, then, to kiss her—a full and sober sort of kiss—as if it stood surety for an oath. “I’m not going to stop,” he said quietly.

Phryne laid a hand to his cheek, able to read in his eyes the intensity of his want, so close, now, to the surface. The furrow between his brows was a haunting. She had believed him when he had said—in a voice bare as his body—that her attentions exacted from him a price. And yet he hadn’t left—as he had proven himself capable of doing so many times before. It had not been a choice made happily, quite, nor without exertion, but here he was, despite everything, and demonstrably of his own free will. And this told her that, regardless of what he thought he thought, he was of more than one mind about whether the cost of a liaison was too great, more than one mind about what change meant. That was a degree to hope, to be sure, but an assurance of nothing. Complicated man, the inspector, whatever he protested to the contrary.

How delicious he had looked to her when she had had on her tongue the taste of _sa verge_ (as a hypocritical lady novelist might have put it) and in her ears his hoarse entreaties. She had made her best attempts to commit to memory the view from on her knees: his hair in disarray, eyes trained on the ceiling in supplication (when they were not trained on her), thumb tapping the notch between her collarbones, hands skimming her temple, as if he had been afraid she would vanish if he didn’t hold her there. Too, she had stolen many glances at the corners of his downturned mouth, which deepened slightly when he was negotiating an intense physical stimulus. This detail, she felt, would be of utmost importance to her in the future. She was quite sure she would never again look at his extraordinary lips without studying them for the precise angles of descent that gave away his condition. As a barometer to his inner life, his mouth was as expressive as the eyes of many another. Learning to read it—him—with tongue and touch and sight and smell and thought—it was a comprehensive education. Its mysteries were potentially infinite.

“You’d tell me wouldn’t you,” he said suddenly, “if I should do something you dislike?”

“Yes. But I do not permit my lovers to do to me things that I do not like.”

“All the same,” he said, hooking one of her legs around his back.

She could feel him, hard against her, nudging his cock into her _mons veneris_. He reached down to touch himself (and wasn’t that a sight!), adjusting the angle of approach. All at once he was an inch or two inside her, the head of his erection polishing the rim of nerve-thick tissue just at the entrance to her body. Hilariously, her mind presented her at that moment with the image of a plum lodged at the top of a graduated cylinder, as if it were the final ingredient in some intricate alchemical cocktail that was panacea and alkahest and philosophers’ stone in one, for surely she was reviving and dissolving and turning into gold. Her hips bucked and the leg curled around his body tightened. She was aware of a drop of sweat trickling down her side and a twinge in her hip where it ground into his. But somehow these mundane imperfections were only spice to the meal. She should have been bereft, she thought, without them to anchor her to the earth.

His eyes on her face were watchful. “French letter?” he murmured.

“No need,” she said.

“Good,” he replied, dropping a kiss in the lea of her jaw. “Good.” He pressed more deeply into her, the friction of his movement firing a _frisson_ that radiated through her body. She could feel another paroxysm gathering as she registered the concentration in his face and reached a hand between them in order to hasten it on. He caught her fingers with surprising swiftness and removed them to his shoulder. “Don’t come,” he said.

She blinked. “But you like it when I come.”

“Don’t come, then, until I like it.”

She raked her nails down his back in retaliation.

He groaned in response but did not retract the request. “Punish me, then,” he said, “but _do_ — _not_ — _come_.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for this game?” said Phryne crossly, folding her other leg around his back as he found a rhythm.

“Most definitely. Aren’t you?”

“Provoking man,” she said, her breath coming very quickly, “if I wanted to, I could come with a single thought.”

“I don’t doubt it. But you won’t.”

“Oh? And why won’t I?”                                              

“Because you want to see where this goes. Because you’re reckless. Because you reserve nothing—”

“—and you everything!”

“Exactly,” he said, “that’s it exactly.”

The torment lasted a long time. Phryne, practicing an unaccustomed (although very exciting) self-discipline, had ample time for reflection on her own spiritual inconsistences. For example, at the present moment she couldn’t decide whether to kiss him or to kill him.

 

*

 

She was going to kill him, Jack thought, stilling his hips as he felt her nearing a climax. By now, all his considerable will was bent on two objects: helping her fight her orgasm and delaying his own. The pursuit of these aims was a project to be pursued as much in the theatre of the mind as in that of the bedroom.

“Now?” she said, in a voice mazy with hunger.

“Not now.”

“Soon?”

“Perhaps,” he told her, knowing that it would only increase her pique.

For her, sex was philosophy. He understood that now—or—no—not philosophy, exactly (that was too abstract), but a sort of thinking, anyway. Their progress over the bed—trading places staring at the ceiling and the sheets, working out the placement of limb and gesture—was a kind of mutual puzzling towards an elusive solution—was, itself, the answer to a question that had long hung over them. If detection had always held for them an element of sex, it stood to reason that sex between them would always approximate the act of detection. How else, when they had grown so used to the regular galvanic kick of an investigation that required the use of every faculty—wit and wile and quickness—in concert? Whatever he felt in the future— _our moods do not believe in each other_ —he would remember that when it had come to the point—now, here—he regretted nothing.

Despite these lofty attitudes, he was unprepared for the speed and strength with which she rolled them over, detaching her body from his with a _squelch!_ that might, in other circumstances, have embarrassed him. Almost before he had time to regret the loss, she dragged him to a sitting position and straddled his lap, hovering there, the heat of her cunt just a breath away from his appetent cock.

“Please, Jack,” she said, though there was more accusation than pleading in her countenance.  

He could deny her nothing—nor, at this moment, he found to his interest, could he deny himself. “Yes, alright,” he said, “kill me if you like.” Really, she was beyond anything. “Come, Phryne.”

She sank onto his erection in one clean rush and he felt, just then, as if he were the spindle on which the earth impaled itself in maps meant to demonstrate axial tilt. _The wide world dreaming on things to come…_ She moved against him with genius as he laid frantic kisses on every square of flesh he could reach—once—twice—thrice—was all it took to catapult him into it, the maximum of feeling--balls tightening, cock upthrusting, shuddering inside her as she came around him, the spasms of his body so drawn-out they seemed to diffuse beyond the borders of his skin. If he opened his eyes, he thought he might see the glow.

He felt himself falling backwards to lie prone on the bed, their bodies still linked, her svelte mass following him down. At his scratched back, the feel of the tangled sheet was unreal, like the water you drank in dreams. He cracked his lids to see her, catching her just as she raised her head from his shoulder. A man could get drunk on that look of loopy satisfaction if he let himself.

“The bed is a good bed,” he said witlessly. “I have decided you may keep it.”


	6. Chapter 6

“Have you no shame,” said Jack Robinson, “no sense of decency?”

“Not really,” said Phryne, “not really much at all. Anyway, I’m careful not to get them wet.”

“You _read_ in your _bath._ That’s never a first edition of _Tristram Shandy_ —”

“Hmm? Oh. On the floor? Suppose it must be, actually. You know, Jack, if you insist on thrashing about in that manner, Mr. Shandy is going to be full-fathom five in no time.”

“That’s it, I’m clapping you in irons.”

“Sounds stimulating. But dangling a book over a bit of water’s not exactly illegal, is it?”

“No, but _that_ is.” He meant the copy of _The Well of Loneliness_ just visible under a haphazard pile of her companion’s _Table Talk_ magazines. (Phryne had almost wholly come around to Dot’s way of thinking about the value of the periodical.) “Banned for obscenity. Though compared to Mr. Shandy, it’s really not much of a…ah…” As he trailed off, his lips rolled under his teeth, then out again on a long sigh.

She looked at him narrowly. “You’ve read it, haven’t you? In fact, I’d bet the Hispano you’ve read rather a lot of filthy, no-good, new-fangled affronts to bourgeois morality.”

“Bloody port officials keep confiscating them at customs—”

“—and storing them at the constabulary for the entertainment and edification of our officers of the law! No wonder you’re so well-versed in obscenity.”

“As a member of the police—“ (He was verifiably sputtering) “I have to—well—and I never take them off the premises, so it’s not technically—” He gave up. “I don’t always do the right thing. I’ve told you and told you.”

“I can honestly say I’ve never respected you more.”

“Precisely what I was afraid of,” said Jack.

The water-level in the tub where they were pleasantly crammed—his back to the porcelain, her back to his chest—trembled ambiguously. One of his arms extended along the tub-rim, the fingers tapping at intervals. The other arm snaked beneath the water, the palm of the hand flat against her stomach. In deference to his masculine sensibilities, she had laced the bath with sandalwood oil rather than attar of lotus, though she felt, privately, that the division of scents into masculine and feminine categories was an absurdity of the lowest order. Then again, she had always had trouble accepting any check that would limit the reach of the mandate of the senses. Why should she not feel everything, and all at once if she liked?

In the realm of sex, there were countless positions, techniques, and refinements and she flattered herself that her repertoire was more diverse than most. She was open to experience, could drink any vintage so long as the company was good. (Both, tonight, were of a quality nearly unprecedented.) But even the most sophisticated animal invention meant nothing to her without those other, internal states it kindled—the signs to affection or laughter or generosity or imagination or longing or, yes (and sometimes especially), power and knowledge. Perhaps it was true, as the old saw went, that all animals were sad after sex. (This was descriptive even of her, on occasion.) But, too—and it was this that the world at large so often seemed to forget—sexual pleasure, sought for its own sake, was often the surest route to acquaintance with the working of another mind. She never felt so creative, so attuned to the social, as when she was focusing her forces on the synergy between bodies. She thought she might feel about it the way others felt about watching football, absorbed into a collective drama in which personality first concentrated, then sublimated into the thing you were conjuring together through your responses. And in this condition, delight was never lacking, whatever else arrived to keep it company. In the sweaty, panting aftermath of their congress, she had seen this delight in him. And so her own delight was seven-fold.

“Modernity has its points,” said Jack, seemingly at random.

“The high caliber of the smut, for one.”

“I was thinking of hot running water at all hours.”

“Why, haven’t you got it yet at yours?”

Jack shrugged. “Just a creaky old waterback on the stove. Takes an age to heat up properly. You could see for yourself sometime,” he said tentatively, “you know, if you felt like roughing it for a night.”

Some feathery sensation seemed to arise within her, then, unfurling just at the place where his thumb grazed her ribcage. Up and up the feeling flew, caroming against each bone in her torso and setting off inward chimes like a marble whizzing through a bagatelle in a penny arcade. A huge, involuntary smile, entirely unbefitting a modern sophisticate, stretched over Phryne’s face. “I’d like that,” she said, not looking at him at all, a tiny quiver doubling the weight of the “I” in “I’d.” “Want to try it?” she went on, glossing over the defenceless wobble.

“Try what?”

She nodded her head at the stacks of books next to the bathtub. “The cardinal sin.”

“You mean there’s one we haven’t covered?”

“Indulge me.”

“In the _bath_ ,” he said tartly, shaking his head as she tossed him a cloth to dry his hands. “Alright, what have we got? No—we’re not reading contraband.”

“Spoilsport.”

“And we’re not profaning _Tristram Shandy_.”

“I’ll profane it on my own time, thank you.”

“For God’s sake, don’t tell me about it. Let’s see. Last Friday’s _Argus_ , _We of the Never Never_ , _Orlando_ , _Cinema Romance_ —Miss Williams’s, I presume—Miles Franklin, of course. _Hungarrda_. Flaubert—my French isn’t up to that—a Russian grammar—no thanks. Dorothy Sayers. A treatise on—Samoa, is it? Aldanov on Lenin. Some Spanish poetry—Greek to me. And this—which—what kind of a name is Djuna Barnes?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you,” said Phryne.

“Katherine Mansfield,” he went on, “ _Poisons: Their Effects and Detection_. And right next to _The Roman Hat Mystery_ —that can’t be accidental. How much time did you say you spent in the bath?”

“Just ’til my toes wrinkle,” she replied virtuously.

He attempted a minatory look but the effect, she thought, was somewhat ruined by the swelling pressure of his cock at her lower back. A little more rummaging and he came up with a small tan volume. “A guide to Alexandria? Why Cleopatra, I didn’t know you cared.”

“It’s nothing to do with you. I’m considering a visit,” she said, sinking her shoulders into the water another inch or two.

“Unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you embarrassed before, not for a single moment.”

“Who’s embarrassed?” said Phryne, very embarrassed indeed. “I’ll thank you to remember I’m a shameless, indecent strumpet and have worked hard to become so.”

“I’d like to bottle this moment,” he said in a tone of boyish glee she had never before heard him employ, “bottle it and wear it on a cord ’round my neck so I can open it up whenever you twit me about Mark Antony. No, don’t move—I want to remember you just like this.”

“Alright, that’s enough, Archie Jones. Let’s have the weather in Egypt.”

“You’ll have to hold it,” he said, passing her the cloth so she could dry her hands.

“Oh?”

“I’ll have my hands full,” he explained, giving her the book.

She pressed back against him in approval as he began tracing figure eights in the folds of her labia with one finger.

“But Jack, what if I should drop it? In the water?”

“Then Mr. Shandy is mine for the taking.”

“High stakes,” she said giddily, “sadly for you, I was born with very steady hands.” She balanced her elbows on the rim of the tub, reveling, as she did, in a merry, unnecessary squirm that squashed her buttocks against his erection. The book she opened, quite by chance, to a section on modern Alexandria. “There,” she said pointing, noting with a sense of justice that his voice, as he began, was not altogether stable:

“ _Alexandria is still alive and alters even while one tries to sum her up_. _Her future like that of other great commercial cities is dubious. Except in the cases of the Public Gardens and the Museum, the Municipality has scarcely risen to its historic responsibilities._ ”

“Sounds a dire place,” said Phryne, as he executed a series of short sharp pulls on the small hood near the zenith of her cunt. The vibrations made by his voice reached her as an even rumble, purring into her through every place their bodies met. Touch—and then touch at a distance—the words saturating her ears, even as the water did her skin.

“Dire. Really? Adaptable, I thought. Not a bad quality in a city.” He went on: “ _The Library is starved for want of funds, the Art Gallery cannot be alluded to, and links with the past have been wantonly_ —”

“Wantonly—” her back arched and her elbows lifted, briefly, from the sides of the tub as his hand gathered the whole of her pubic mound in a hard grasp that turned to an undulant, massaging motion. The tip of his middle finger rested just at the start of her perineum and her dim view of the proceedings through the scrim of liquid was almost enough--not quite--to make her nerveless fingers release the guide. The first ripples of the climax, heightened by the lapping of the water, overtook her.

“— _wantonly broken_ ,” he resumed when she had subsided,“ _for example the name of the Rue Rosette has been altered and the exquisite Covered Bazaar near the Rue de France destroyed_ . . .”

“Honestly,” Phryne mumbled, closing her eyes, “he doesn’t like a thing about Alexandria.”

“On the contrary,” said Jack, “he’s mad for it, the fool. Listen: _only the climate, only the north wind and the sea remain as pure as when Menelaus, the first visitor, landed upon Ras-el-Tin, three thousand years ago; and at night the constellation of Berenice’s Hair still shines as brightly as when it caught the attention of Conon the astronomer…_ ”

He paused and the motion of his hand below the water ceased for an instant, to Phryne’s desolation. 

“The chapter ends with a poem.”

“Who by?”

“Greek fellow.”

“Well, go on,” said Phryne, opening her eyes expectantly to look up at his face.

Jack’s hand had resumed its ministrations and a finger painted up and down the crease where her thigh joined her hip, as if it were pacing back and forth in thought. The corner of his mouth quirked up inscrutably, censoring a wince, perhaps, or a laugh. That hint of sorrow had returned—she saw it flicker across his irises like a strange, small fish circumnavigating its bowl. He read:

 

_When at the hour of midnight_

_an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing_

_with exquisite music, with voices—_

_Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides,_

_your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have proved illusions._

_But like a man prepared, like a brave man,_

_bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing._

_Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream,_

_that your ear was mistaken._

_Do not condescend to such empty hopes._

_Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,_

_like to the man who was worthy of such a city,_

_go to the window firmly,_

_and listen with emotion,_

_but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward_

_(Ah! supreme rapture!)_

_listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,_

_and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing._

 

She did drop the book in the end, although not in the water (it was a near miss). Jack, a man of his word, conceded the wager on a technicality--and not ungraciously.


	7. Chapter 7

 

Phryne had tried, valiantly but without success, to convince Jack that a bed-sheet toga made a perfectly acceptable dressing gown for a midnight raid on the pantry. He, meanwhile—not yet devoid of an instinctive modesty—had demurred in favor of frox and trousers, which he had consented, at last, to wear without trunk drawers (though this allowance had been made only after a cursory inspection of the bedroom turned up no sign of the garment). While he made his search, she swathed herself in a clean kimono, black and adorned with a pair of fighting cocks (why not?) who waged polychromatic battle from her shoulders to her nates.

“What happened to the silver one?” he said as she tied her sash. “I was beginning to form an attachment.”

“My collection consists of both pre-coital and post-coital peignoirs.”

“And the difference?”

“Pre-coital peignoirs precede the concepts of nudity and sin. Post-coital peignoirs have encountered with serpents and eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and so, alas, may never be worn to a garden party.”

“A most fortunate fall,” said Jack.

In the kitchen, they scrounged up a jar of passionfruit jam, a moon-white wedge of cheddar, and an airy _boule_ of Mr. Butler’s French bread, only a day old. Even Jack, who found the idea of a live-in domestic risibly alien, had to agree that there some distinct benefits to the arrangement, mostly having to do with the ready availability of sandwich materials. (He could not, in any case, imagine Miss Fisher concerning herself with anything so workaday as linens and bluing and receipts for Peach Melba.). Like the rest of her house, the kitchen was very clean and very new and everywhere there were jars full of iridescent objects—edible, in this case—pickles, no doubt, or preserves. More than once had he spent a fraught moment at that table, meeting her eyes across its sturdy, wooden expanse—and yet the room seemed, in the instant, unfamiliar, as if it—and not he—had suffered a sequence of mercurial shocks.

He was focusing on these details, he supposed, in order to avoid confronting a subtending current of reaction. Foremost in this feeling was the drugged ecstasy of sexual release. _Ecstasy._ A melodramatic word, but somehow it had found its level with him as the night galloped onward. And mixed with ecstasy (which he could now use in a meaningful—if not rational—sense) was the distressing urge to fix in memory the camber of her waist, the stains of pink across her cheek, the exact degree to which her pupils dilated when she was on the verge of orgasm.

 _You will not believe what has happened to me!_ He wanted to shout it to strangers on the street. _Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was…_ To put it in the vulgar vernacular, he had fucked Phryne Fisher—and Phryne Fisher had fucked him—inventively, comprehensively, and irrevocably. He was still having trouble with that, largely because he knew it as the other side of a Rubicon but, being in darkness, couldn’t gauge the solidity of the new ground. Nor, truth be told, could he survey the whole of what he might have left on the other side of the river. _Antony that revels long ’o nights_ , he thought dryly.

Her fingers darted to his plate to filch a morsel of cheese, which she popped into her mouth with a flourish. He looped his arm protectively around his meal.

“Police property,” he said. _Utterly impossible_ , he thought.

“Must be why it tastes so good,” she answered, wiggling her eyebrows.

As if a levee had burst in it, his mind was now afire with long-repressed schemes for retaining her erotic interest. (He thought fondly on her tiger-like qualities, for he felt, not disagreeably, that he, who was only a man in the final accounting, must amuse her mightily or be mauled and dismissed.) Strategies that had long been powered by his own peculiarities of taste, he found himself confronting head-on, fully and for the first time, rapidly revising them to suit what he now knew of the shape of her appetites. Gaining in confidence, he had even made a wager with himself about how many times he could satisfy her before morning—it was a high number. All this was an expression of gratitude in a way (he knew he should be grateful, though not exactly for what), but it was also more than that. This was the effect of her extravagance: he wanted to make her come until they both collapsed in exhaustion, until 2029, until electric books and self-ironing shirts and world peace and weekend holidays to Mars. He wanted to make her come—full stop. He wanted to come inside her.

Where was his sense of caution? Intellectually, he still clung to the necessity of self-protection but he couldn’t, in the moment, recover the emotion that justified it. All told, he should never have read to her of Alexandria. It lay too close to the bone—not because he had made any kind of simple equation between her and that inconstant city (though he suspected that this supposition had crossed her mind)—but because the words of the book had catalyzed an understanding that was only now coming into focus, like the latent image on a silver gelatin print.

For him, she was Cleopatra (and would be always, probably). Alexandria was something else entirely, something they had made between them and entered into, a room, perhaps, or a contract. It was true that he felt a little guilty about abstracting an entire city to develop the grounds of a metaphor that could have small meaning outside the privacy of his mind—but the impulse was stubborn.

So. Alexandria—quintessence of glimmers, continually lost and won, site of change, where even the same was not the same. It would leave you over and over again, that city. It could be visited but never inhabited, found but never kept. The way in and out was arcane and irregular—never the same twice running—and so strenuous it could not be traveled alone.

Who, then, were Antony and Cleopatra? Two voluptuaries, no longer in their first youth, who suffered—as Shakespeare had it—an unrepentant, second adolescence. _Amour fou:_ no bourn how far to be beloved. They had grown secure in their worldliness, so stuffed with monumental powers and lusts that they had missed the smell of destruction wafting off the volatile concoction of their passions. And yet, despite this, they were naïve, somehow. They confused sex with death and desire with duty, were proud, quite literally, unto death. In a sense they were admirable, rapt with the marvel of one another, tender in abjection. They were character incarnate—but not destiny. Alexandria did not require them but perhaps, he thought, you had to go through them to get there.

No, he ought never have read to her of Alexandria. But then, by these standards, he ought never have met her, spoken to her, laughed with her, drunk with her, learned the temperature of her mouth, the scent of her cunt, the feel of it parting around his cock…There was nothing in “ought” that could tell him how to handle the reeling onslaught of sensation that had overcome him in the last hours. Alexandria explained it, somehow, as much as it could be explained. It was a necessary mirage, an instrument of knowing.

(She would understand that, surely. He thought he might tell her someday.)

All night, he had been fumbling for an ort of comprehension that had finally coalesced: he had never set out to go to Alexandria but, having been there, having taken it into blood and breath, he guessed he would never go a day without some wistful thought of returning. It was this he had resisted as much as anything. He would survive it, of course, as he had survived other, more material dangers. Nonetheless, he conceived of Alexandrian influence as a malarial thing—carried in secret, lying dormant until the fever flared to recall you to its presence. There was the taste of exhilaration in it—but also of fear—he thought he knew why now.

“Where are they, anyway?” he said vaguely, realizing he had been silent a while.

“Where’s who?” She was leaning against him, her head drowsing against his shoulder.

“Your foster daughter, your companion, and your chief of domestic staff. This interlude has been remarkably private.”

“The overnight to Adelaide,” said Phryne, yawning. “Janey wanted to see the grounds for the Royal Show before she sails for school.” She lifted her eyelids a fraction. “Dot and Mr. Butler were keen; I wasn’t.”

“How long are they gone?”

“A week. It coincided neatly with the end of my self-control. Concerning you, that is,” she said a bit self-consciously, “I mean, concerning your virile charms.”

A thrill passed through him. “I’m only impressed you resisted me this long, Miss Fisher.”

“Men have died from time to time,” she said archly, “and worms have eaten them—”

“—but not for love.”

“I hear they’re awarding me a medal.”

“I won’t ask what for. A week without Miss Williams. Collins will mope around the station making calf-eyes at the telephone.”

“Unless,” she said, “he’s suddenly put in for leave.”

“What have you done with my constable?”

“Nothing nefarious. Really. That’s a certifiable glower, Jack. Alright, I may have mentioned—in passing, mind you—that Archie Bradley was signing autographs in Adelaide this weekend.”

“Adelaide’s got his fiancée _and_ his favorite fighter? Unfair and you know it. Collins keeps a photo of the man in his locker, right next to the one of Miss Williams.”

“Am I to blame if Hugh Collins can’t confine himself to one Archie at a time?”

He told himself the kiss was a sound rebuke but it quickly got out of hand. “Tell me,” he said, thinking of something that might please her and nourish, as well, his own greed for knowledge, “tell me how you imagined it when you first decided you’d have your way with me.”

“Tell me,” she countered, “how you imagined it when you first decided you’d have your way with _me_.”

“Bent over a kitchen chair with your arse to the ceiling.”

“Excellent suggestion but I don’t believe you for a moment. Shall I tell you how it was? I remember it was not many months after we’d met and you’d told me you lived apart from your wife. Tacit permission, I suppose, for my mind to go to work.” She was fiddling, absently, with the tie of her kimono as she spoke. The sides of the robe fell open as the knot gave with a soft _zzssss_ and the sash resolved itself into a black stripe across her palm. “I had barged into your office as usual—”

“So you admit to barging.”

“But I do it with such panache.” The panels of the kimono shivered further apart as she spread her legs. He flicked his eyes down appreciatively before returning them to her face. “I had barged in as usual and there you were, sitting behind your desk with a very straight back, your mouth strict, your tie just slightly crooked. That was what did it. All at once I imagined you rising and pulling it from around your neck and binding my hands behind my back.”

He found his wrists encased in the slippery fabric of the sash, which she knotted loosely around them. Already, his pulse had begun to speed.

“You sat me on the desk and told me not to move a muscle and I was feeling cooperative, for once, so I didn’t. Then you opened the fly of your trousers and there you were—already hard. I’ve imagined, since then, a few ways your cock could be—the color, the shape, the size, the taste—don’t worry—the reality is better—but at this point in my thinking on the subject, the details were hazy. I only knew I liked what I saw. You stroked yourself a few times to tease me— ” She sent two fingers into the creased pleats between her legs and he watched avidly as she touched herself how she liked to be touched.

“And then, really without warning,” she said, “your mouth was on my neck and you were inside me. The feeling was so intense that for a full minute you forgot you hadn’t locked the door.”

Working out of the loose binding of the sash, he lifted her to the table and opened his fly, as eager as the man she had imagined to advance their conversation in the direction she had indicated.

“I would never forget to lock the door,” he said, pushing into her heavily.

“I know. That’s what makes it so piquant.” She winced and he was instantly repentant.

“Sore?”

“Yes—no—a little—but it’s like—it’s like salt for sweetness. Don’t stop, please.”

He pinned her wrists to the table by way of assent, the gesture wringing a husky sob from her throat, which was now suffused with a blush that ran all the way down to her breasts. It was pleasant to kiss her and fuck her at once, the motion of the tongue playing counterpoint to the other motion below.

“I haven’t finished, though,” she said. “You forget to lock the door and someone begins knocking—”

“No.” (It was an exclamation of true dread.)

“You’re horrified, of course, and the look on your face is just—I start laughing and can’t stop, though you’ve got a hand over my mouth to keep me quiet. The knocking gets louder—and just as the door is about to open—” She demonstrated the consequences with cheerful enthusiasm and he, feeling unusually amenable to suggestion, soon followed suit.

“Remind me, sometime,” he said when sense returned, “to tell you my feelings about the Esplanade Hotel.”

They made some minor ablutions at the sink and afterwards he helped her set herself to rights, smoothing her hair, retying her kimono. Nothing, of course, could dim the pale flames in her cheeks, which testified to the aftermath of pleasure. Already, she was half-asleep.

“It’s late,” he said, vacillating as he saw a thread of wariness enter her face, “and I’ve got an early morning.” He gathered his nerve: “Mind if I stay the night?”

“If you don’t, I will never forgive you. However, the invitation will be rescinded if you insist on sleeping on the kitchen floor.”

“I am persuadable,” he said simply, “you persuade me, quite.” Despite his exhaustion, he followed her upstairs with alacrity.

Jack Robinson was no fool.

 

*

When he woke, he hardly knew where he began and she ended. He had slept far less than he needed to but dawn was breaking and he had to be at the station—and, moreover, had to hurry to his flat beforehand to make the necessary repairs to his appearance. Phryne’s limbs were thrown over him every which way so that he was slightly too hot and one arm ached where a turn of her skull was denting his bicep. Light and cool air were sifting through the gaps between curtains, projecting slim, acid-bright triangles on the rug. He watched one change from isosceles to scalene for a few minutes while an unaccustomed feeling made itself known to him. _Salt for sweetness_ , she might have called it.

_Night’s candles are burnt out._

She slept deeply, not even stirring when he made his way cautiously out of bed to collect his clothing from its several places in the room. (The trunk drawers, so egregiously missing last night, had turned up coiled around a leg of the vanity). When he had dressed as best he could—nothing to be done for that quantity of wrinkles—he moved about the house, tidying and straightening as he went, restoring the divan in the parlour to order, clearing the remnants of their midnight feast.

(He doubted she would bother to perform these tasks herself.)

All, at last, was as it should be. He went to the chiffonier in the hallway, where he had seen a number of pens and a set of linen stationery, and removed a square of paper. He wrote on one side, then the other, not very much, but firmly and without hesitation.

Then, paper in hand, he returned to the bedroom where he had left her and propped it on the small table next to the bed. He looked down at her, wondering, for a moment, whether he ought to wake her after all. But her joy in sleep (confirmed, now, though not unguessed at) was as complete as her joy in waking and he could not bring himself to change one state to the other.

No telling what she dreamed about.

It was a mistake, he thought, to say that you knew people. But no more could you say they were unknowable. This, in itself, would be a disgraceful default of common responsibility. You tried for knowledge or you forfeited your right to a human share. To be human, of course, was aspirational, merely—and no blessing in its unperfected state—and yet it was, for all that, the only ambition he cared to name. The dispassionate world spun on, regardless of whether you achieved it.

It was wrong, too, come to think of it, to believe any person was less than a casing for an invisible city—peopled by riddles, inconsistencies, and whims, selves lost and selves found—a city governed by habit and in all things rich with secret ways and means. He thought of the city he was and the city he had met in her. He thought, too, of that other city they had got to in the night. He didn’t know that it could be reached again, not for certain. But he knew where it was now—and that it was—and he thought he might find his way again when he needed to, if he asked her, if she remembered.

“Good morning,” he said softly, to selves dying, dead, and yet to be born, to the woman in the bed as well. He really believed it was.

Downstairs, he buttoned his coat and tilted his hat to the correct angle, then shut the door behind him. It closed with a firm _snick_. Outside, the dawning day was unruly with sun. And with long quiet strides, Jack Robinson walked into it.

 

*

Even before she opened her eyes, Phryne knew she was alone. It was not, in the end, unexpected. Her mood was equivocal—she had dreamed she was filming a picture on the rings of Saturn, chorines in brave, gold spangles pirouetting through the interplanetary darkness. A small sigh escaped her. Not yet allowing herself to know her surroundings fully, she stretched her arms and pointed her toes until she had made herself as large as possible. With a hissing exhale, she released the tension, calling what had gone into dreams back into the limits of the body. As she did so, her wrist grazed a piece of paper on the nightstand, which she caught up at once, the last dregs of somnolence dispelled.

His handwriting was angular, swift, and decisive, the flourishes on the capitals a hair longer, perhaps, than was strictly necessary. For all that the words were perfectly legible, she had to read them several times before she took their meaning. And when she did, she laughed until she was crying a little, the sounds fracturing into silvery filaments against the walls of her boudoir.

On one side of the note was written the address of a flat in Carlton, which boasted (she was almost certain) indifferent access to hot running water. On the other he had penned the legend:

_Map—to Alexandria._


End file.
